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Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years. The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is 79. People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had taxis long before GPS. When I was in my early 20s I had a job delivering pizza. I very quickly learned the delivery area, I knew pretty much every street and alleyway and shortcut to get from one place to another. Much smaller than London but I think the human brain is very good at remembering routes and where things are in an area, as this would have been an evolutionary advantage (go out hunting and be able…
I suspect GPS has made this much worse. I shining example was an Uber I got in Chicago, where GPS doesn't work well due to all the buildings. The guy drove around the same block 3 times, blindly following the GPS. It was infuriating.
> In one landmark 2000 study, neuroscientists compared the brains of licensed London taxi drivers with those of people who did not drive cabs. Location is very important here. London cabbies have to pass The Knowledge which is an extremely difficult memory exam that only people with particular kind of brain can do.
Today this knowledge is arguably less useful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect GPS has made this much worse. I shining example was an Uber I got in Chicago, where GPS doesn't work well due to all the buildings. The guy drove around the same block 3 times, blindly following the GPS. It was infuriating.
And Chicago is one of the easier cities to navigate, as it's almost entirely a grid.
Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years. The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is 79. People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the paper points out that's accounted for in the analysis, because shockingly enough to most internet commentators researchers know that they need to control for confounding variables https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194
Always insane to me how people will just read the headline of an article and point out "flaws" based on what they assume the article says
> In one landmark 2000 study, neuroscientists compared the brains of licensed London taxi drivers with those of people who did not drive cabs. Location is very important here. London cabbies have to pass The Knowledge which is an extremely difficult memory exam that only people with particular kind of brain can do.
That's yours speculation, isn't it?Because if so, it would corroborate the same conclusion, i.e. if you exercise your memory regularly, you are less likely to develop Alzheimer's.
Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years. The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is 79. People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.
That's very interesting but why do taxi drivers have a job that lowers life expectancy? Is it because they're sitting too much? Or because they're inhaling CO from cars too much? Or staying inside (the car) too much? Or is it just stressful? For from the look of it it doesn't look like an exceptionally hard job (btw a brother of mine did years of "VTC": "Vehicule de Tourisme avec Chauffeur" , basically high-end taxis…
Define "hard job". Carrying heavy objects?